New Orleans Jazz

About New Orleans Jazz

Jazz was born in New Orleans around 1900, where brass bands, ragtime, blues, and the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Congo Square met in the dance halls of Storyville. Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet shaped the collective, polyphonic style, and a young Louis Armstrong carried it up the Mississippi to Chicago in 1922, where his Hot Five recordings turned jazz into an art of the soloist. The city's second lines, brass bands, and Jazz Fest keep the tradition alive today.